Empirical analysis of Japanese football games using structural equation modeling

Abstract

This paper presents a framework and an empirical result for two football games played by Japanese professional football teams, focusing on their offence. By using ball possession data, this study analyses the performance of midfielders’ and forwards’ tasks, such as assists, breaking down, passthrough, and traps to determine associations among selected strength and performance variables which lead to scoring. The structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the framework.